11.
God is supremely human. Throughout the heavens one finds no other idea of God than the idea of a person. The reason is that heaven in its totality and in every part is in its form as though a single
person, and it is the Divine existing in angels which forms heaven. Thought, moreover, proceeds in accordance with the form of heaven. Consequently it is impossible for angels to think of God in any
other way. For the same reason, all people in the world who are conjoined with heaven think similarly of God when they think inwardly in themselves or in their spirit. It is because God is human that
all angels and all spirits are human beings in perfect form. The form of heaven causes this, its form being the same in its greatest and in its least constituents. (That heaven in its totality and
in every part is in its form as though a single person may be seen in the book Heaven and Hell, nos. 59-87; and that thoughts proceed in accordance with the form of heaven in nos. 203, 204. That people
were created in the image and likeness of God is known from Genesis 1:26, 27; and it is also known that God appeared as a person to Abraham and others.) People in ancient times, from the wise to
the simple among them, thought of God only as a person, and when they eventually began to worship a plurality of gods, as they did in Athens and Rome, they worshiped them all as persons. [2] These
observations may be illustrated by the following account, which we related in a short work previously:* (Gentiles, especially Africans,) who acknowledge and worship one God as the creator of the universe,
have of God the idea of a person. They say that no one can have any other idea of God. When they hear that many people entertain an idea of God as a kind of small cloud (at the center of the universe),
they ask where those people are, and when they are told that they are found among Christians, they say it is not possible. But they are informed in reply that those Christians acquire that idea
of theirs from the fact that in the Word God is called a spirit,** and they think of spirit only in the way that they do of a bit of vapor, not knowing that every spirit and every angel is a person. Nevertheless,
those Christians were examined to see whether their spiritual idea was like their natural idea, and it was found not to be like it in those who inwardly acknowledged the Lord as God
of heaven and earth. I heard one church elder among the Christians saying that no one can have the idea of a Divine Human. I then saw him conveyed to various gentile nations, to progressively more and
more interior ones, and from these to their heavens, and finally to the Christian heaven, everywhere having communicated to him the inhabitants' interior perception of God; and he observed that they
had no other idea of God than that of a person, which is the same as the idea of a Divine Human. * See Continuation Concerning the Last Judgment and the Spiritual World, no. 74. ** John 4:24. Cf.
2 Corinthians 3:17.